Setting building help with intrigue and sci-fi

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Which probably leads to the biggest question of all: What's the setting's conflict or conflicts about? What is there to fight for?

At higher TLs, if you extrapolate realitically, the answer tends to be "not much".

Iain M. Banks describes it well in "A Few Notes..." how once you get up out of the "gravity well", and if you have the technology to make your machines make more machines for you, then you can break away from the society you came from and set up on your own, fairly easily (that's how the "Culture" came to be, but it's obviously something that happens often in that setting - they're unique or nearly unique for reasons other than that).

Banks' essay is very good, and all of it is somewhat pertinent to the hugely important issue of worldbuilding, but it's a very long text, so I've identified the most important part of it, very roughly something like 8% to 15% of the entire essay, which I'm quoting here:

Originally Posted by Iain M. Banks

The Culture, in its history and its on-going form, is an expression of the idea that the nature of space itself determines the type of civilisations which will thrive there.

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats. The hostile nature of the vacuum and the technological complexity of life support mechanisms will make such systems vulnerable to outright attack, but that, of course, would risk the total destruction of the ship/habitat, so denying its future economic contribution to whatever entity was attempting to control it.

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind. Rebellion, then (once space-going and space-living become commonplace), becomes easier than it might be on the surface of a planet.

Even so, this is certainly the most vulnerable point in the time-line of the Culture's existence, the point at which it is easiest to argue for things turning out quite differently, as the extent and sophistication of the hegemony's control mechanisms - and its ability and will to repress - battles against the ingenuity, skill, solidarity and bravery of the rebellious ships and habitats, and indeed the assumption here is that this point has been reached before and the hegemony has won... but it is also assumed that - for the reasons given above - that point is bound to come round again, and while the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.

Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

...Just as a service for those who don't want to read the entire essay right now.

Note, though, that Bank's "Culture" is TL12, in GURPS terms.

With optimism, fully self-sufficient small space habitats (mobile or not) can be achieved at TL9. More reasonably at TL10. I think it might be just barely defensible to postpone full self-sufficiency to TL11, though, and that is roughly the case in my space opera setting.

There, you have a particular class of space-navy cruiser or carrier able to fly on long sorties, lasting several years, without needing to re-supply (or at most needing to re-supply from a small fleet of tender ships that travels with it - it doesn't need to return home at all during those years), 3 or 5 years or perhaps 10 or 15, they can repair their auxiliary craft, even modify them a bit, but can't build new ones, nor can they fully maintain a population with baby day care, kindergardens and so forth, although they can and do educate their crews while out to a much larger exten than present day naval ships do.

TL-wise, well I don't use GURPS' Tech Levels, but it's somewhere 9-10'ish, although with Technology Path modifiers as described in GURPS Ultra-Tech (and in the old Ultra-Tech 2 for 3rd Edition), higher TL for some things, and much lower TLs for some other things (such as computers).

Eventually, these strategic cruisers, and strategic carriers, will have to return home, to stock up on spare parts, and rare earths, and so forth, and to discharge some crew and take in new crew. I think a strategic cruiser which flies on its own can probably be out for 3 or 5 years, maybe a bit longer with a really good quartermaster (or if they have some pre-Interregnum tech - that's a thing, in the setting), while a strategic carrier flying with its task force of smaller ships, including tenders carrying additional supplies, can be out for 7-8 years, maybe 10, or if it packs cargo for it, as long as 15.

Most space navy ships, most navy task forces, don't go out on such long sorties. Strategic ships are unusual, and somewhat rare. Theyre' ship classes designated as "strategic", as opposed to normal cruisers, carriers, destroyers and smaller ships which aren't, and where not visiting a space dock for 18 standard months would be unusual and would start to get uncomfortable ("french fries and tabasco turkey for dinner again? WTF?!?! I'm going to contact the union about a class action law suit! For reals this time!!")

(The Lazians don't use frozen replacement crew much. If they did, that'd change things somewhat, but in a time period of fairly rapid technological change, anyone who is frozen for more than a couple of decades is going to experience serious culture shock, and therapists aren't cheap. The Traveller RPG setting is an example of much slower technological change, and there is makes much more sense to put crew into hibernation for decades or sometimes the better part of a century, without that causing more than minimal SAN loss.)